Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1453
Assorted familial ailments, LA celebrity photographers making cat posters, a litany of milquetoast Dem senators, projects 2027 ad 29, the mystery of the hyperlinks in Tolkien
Good morning. Hello. Hi. What’s up. How you doing? Hanging in there? I referenced the “Hang in there” cat poster yesterday and my sister did not remember the one hanging in my mom’s classroom, back when she still taught high school, before her stint as the Vice Principal at my high school, before she went back to teaching middle school. We called “middle school” junior high where I come from, like god intended.
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It is hard to find the original hang in there poster on the internet these days. Lotta imitators. Wikipedia tells me the original was made by an LA celebrity photographer named Victor Baldwin. I am not sure, actually, that the Argosy version my mom had was the original. But my memory has now merged them. Here is Baldwin’s original:
I did not use the phrase in relationship to my mom, but speaking of my mom, she is indeed hanging in there. Might be out of the hospital in the next three, four days. I might have to go up there. Probably will. Things are still changing by the day. It is insanely frustrating because there’s still no overarching, coherent explanation. Just shit going haywire with her body. This irks me. I expect more from modern medicine. I do not know why I expect more from modern medicine.
Emma’s migraine is mostly over, thank you for those expressing your concern for my wife’s well-being. She’s gonna need it, given that I’m probably gonna run off to Alaska. Again.
We are listening this morning to a band called Flowerguts. Kinda gross, kinda pretty. Initial first blush it struck me as a terrible band name but it is growing on me. I do like them as a band, though. Not that I know anything about them. Album is “Everything God Isn’t.” Flowerguts.
I would just like to say for the record that I made a really good tweet skeet post whatever and no one got it because it takes two different corpuses (corpi?) of inside baseball: European history and the automotive industry, but cmon man, it is just great:
Inspired by a recent Sandy Munro youtube video that guy is such a fascist toadie.
Speaking of fascist toadies, Schumer has to go. Has lost the trust of the house, lost the trust of the bulk of his senate colleagues — you simply cannot have a Senate Leader vote in the vast minority of his own party on any issue, let alone one as consequential to the fate of humanity. If we do manage to survive this, Schumer’s vote will be seen as a permanent, irreversible black mark. If we lose and democracy is over, that will be seen as the moment. There’s no recovering from it.
Who to replace him though. Pretty sad bench amongst US Democratic Senators. Only three of them do any sort of media fighting, which is sorely needed. And most of em suck in some way. Chris Murphy is internet savvy and fights decently online, mostly safe seat. White Dude. Too young. Makes a lot of mistakes. Elizabeth Warren is doing her best to fight, safe seat, national reputation, but has outsourced her digital operation, doesn’t tweet herself. Has become disturbingly, disappointingly centrist on several key issues, utterly failed on Gaza. But boy would she piss Trump off and that is a key part of the job. Her gender wouldn’t matter much since she’s not running for national office. Runner up, we’ll call her.
Bernie, of course, is the real answer (Rick just glosses over but maturely acknowledges his strong preference for Warren over Bernie in a previous presidential). That would be fucking hilarious, and a reasonable outcome for the utter failure of the Senate Dems. But it would never happen. But it should.
Schiff has shit the bed, Blumenthal is spent, Ossoff not fighting and needs to retain his seat, ditto Warnock, Schatz maybe has some potential, Hirono, Durbin, Duckworth, Van Holen, Alsobrooks, Peters all non-entites. Slotkin basically the enemy. Durbin is a drag. Cortez Mastr, Rosen, Shaheen, Hassan, Kim, Heinrich may as well be on vacation. I desperately wish Booker were the answer but seriously what has that dude done in the last three months to inspire any confidence he is rising to the occasion. He didn’t even turn up the rhetoric dial on his outsourced social team. Gilibrand sucks, Luan non entity, Widen pissed me off about something recently, Fetterman is barking up the wrong Nevil Chamberlain tree. Never even heard of Reed, Whitehouse is too into his hair, Welch, Warner, Murray, Kaine all checked out. Ditto Cantwell, Baldwin, Klobchar and Smith.
God, what a completely pathetic lot as a whole, and that’a without even bothering to go look at their voting record on funding genocides. Let alone, you know, saying they asked for it, like Schumer just did. My god.
This “shadow cabinet” idea has legs, but I think they need to take it a lot further than anyone is talking. We need a project 2027 and a project 2029 on the left. We need model legislation, we need pledges from primary candidates. We need an action plan for day one when we take the house and/or all of congress, we need the bills written, we need everyone signed on. This pathetic-ass lot of Senators will take the Senate and settle in to “back to normal.” It’ll take ‘em six months to pass a bill to restore Pepfar, or protect Social Security or whatever. Both projects need to include active plans to prosecute all of these people.
They need to pack the Supreme Court and kill the filibuster on day one. They need to be ready.
And someone right now needs to be methodically documenting every single law being broken. And they need to have a plan to prosecute. Quickly. No more letting it go like Obama or thinking it’ll fade like Biden did. Those were both gigantic fucking mistakes in hindsight. Understandable. I get where they were coming from. But no more.
I used to assume that this giant apparatus of Democratic politics had people who were “on it.” I am no longer sure of this. We need our versions of Steven Miller and the cranks who sat in darkness for four years writing out the most ambitious, batshit plans possible.
But way more simply we need to recognize the game has changed and god, reading that list of senators was as depressing for me as living every day under this regime. What a fuckin joke of a roster. That a state as supposedly blue as MA sends someone like Ed Markey to senate is a fucking joke. Michelle Wu needs to primary his ass and if not her, how bout, I dunno. Luke O’Neil or something.
Sorry. Sorry.
But if anyone is working on a Project 2027 or 2029, sign me the fuck up right now.
Last night I was reading volume 10 of The History of Middle Earth, like you do, reading about Tolkien’s post-LOTR work on the origin story of Middle Earth, you know, the shit with singing angels and relentlessly bitter Melkor and the knocking down of his own Lamps because he is a big-ass baby. Seems familiar. Checks out. But that’s not the point of this GMHHAY segment, that is the setting.
I am reading these books on Kindle. I do own paper copies, two different ones, thank you very much, of all 12 books, so don’t get on my case about it. The kindle purchase is additive. This is also not the point of this GMHHAY segment, this is also the setting.
The Kindle books are very well done, Tolkien estate should be applauded for them. They are correctly formatted, the graphics are great, all the footnotes click through. Just fantastic.
But there is one quirk of them that I can’t figure out, even after ten volumes. In addition to footnotes, they have copious hyperlinks. In the text. Where a segment of the text is underlined, and when you click it, it goes to… another place in the book that is vaguely related. It is clear someone put a fuck ton of work into this, we are talking 1-2 hyperlinks per page across, well, across all 12 volumes, we’re talking five, six thousand pages.
Buuuut the links are… kinda useless? It’s always to some other place in the book that is barely, tangentially related. And they link to a page not a passage so you’re never even sure what the point of the link is.
And I am also confused: like these links have no analog in the paper copies. Someone did this just for the Kindle. But who? Why? Not Christopher Tolkien, I assume (hilarious mental image there). It is an extraordinary amount of work for unclear gain, unclear scholarship.
I am endlessly intrigued by this enigma.
Let me know if you have any ideas.
Oh shit I need some Jane anecdote to close out the edition. Oh hey this morning int he car she didn’t want me to brush her hair, as usual, and so after a rousing game of “hug tickle battle,” I said “you know, you could just brush it yourself, it’ll hurt less” and she seemed intrigued and tried it and brushed her hair just fine and didn’t hurt at all and I am really wondering why it did not occur to me for years to just try that.
That’s not a very good anecdote, sorry. Maybe I should make something up like Paul Graham does and tell you that Jane offered a critique of the new translation of Marx or something. “I like its accessibility,” she said, “but it neuters the old zingers of quotes that us leftists know and love.”
It really happened. It did.
Hey look we’re done with a new playlist in the W Hotel Lobby in a Better, Alternate Universe series. Man, we are getting further and further from that better, alternate universe. I bet in this universe the W Hotel is just playing the sound of moaning crowds in its lobbies these days. All new tracks here on this playlist except for Renegade Soundwave, because there was a live(ish) version of that track in the Rema Rema documentary cuz one guy from Renegade Soundwave was in Rema Rema which is a crazy fact I did not know for decades. This probably does not seem weird to you if you have never heard of Rema Rema or Renegade Soundwave but I had so wtf it’s kinda like that day I found out Joy Division and New Order had a bunch of the same members in it only I am 52 and not 14.
I can’t believe I am almost through this week of non-stop 6:30 mornings (6:21, actually.) One more day. I can do it. You can do it. We can do it.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.